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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#131

Post by inigyou »

wiseowise wrote: post #44
p-o wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hy…

> but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.

There isn't a unifying end goal, each individual actor has the goal of getting more money.

Re: This time is different

#132

Post by pedalpete »

senko wrote: post #122

The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech: > 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. ...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed: > microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cl…

Exactly! If this post had been written 20 years ago it would have started with

Internet, handheld computers, electric cars...The problem is the same dudes.

Putting beanie babies in with Quantum Computing and Nuclear Power completely ignores the potential life changing elements of some technologies, even if they don't work.

Oh, and smart glasses he put in there, so he'll be eating his words in 2 years.

Re: This time is different

#133

Post by vor_ »

thesmart wrote: post #64
CompoundEyes wrote: post #53

I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.

[flagged]

Are you really reviewing 30-40k lines of code a day?

Re: This time is different

#134

Post by stnmtn »

edent wrote: post #32
ej88 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> write an article dismissing ai > usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini the jokes write themselves

That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways. As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.

Have you tried a coding agent such as claude code or codex?

Re: This time is different

#135

Post by inigyou »

paulddraper wrote: post #55
stego-tech wrote: post #48

Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors. "This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn'…

Is this “nothing ever happens”

Short of insider trading, betting on things not happening is apparently the best way to make money on those shady betting sites.

Re: This time is different

#136

Post by CompoundEyes »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #113
CompoundEyes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...

What's the feature that was built though? This sounds like low-value refactoring. They are fundamentally different development workflows.

Yes porting and also implementation of new features. Typical client requests for new functionality in business to business software.

Re: This time is different

#137

Post by artemonster »

seertaak wrote: post #87

To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming…

Can you elaborate your choice about asymmetric multimethods? I also tinker with my PL and wanted to hear your reasonings and ideas

Re: This time is different

#138

Post by jdub »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #40
riddley wrote: post #26

Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?

Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands. I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too. I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too. And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far wit…

But there's a spectrum of responses to these technologies, from knee-jerk cynicism to genuine moral disgust. "Useful" and "good for people/society/humanity" don't always go hand-in-hand, particularly if you take origins and power into account.

Re: This time is different

#139

Post by bogzz »

LLMs are really a marvel, GPT 2 actually inspired me to go back to college (not directly, rather I needed to understand how it worked).

I have unlimited derision for morally spineless worms who disingenuously make it out to be more than it is-- looking at Dario, Sam, and the silly CEO of Control AI. Also, I hate to say it but Andrej Karpathy on twitter-- he's a worthless follow now. I can't blame, but am daily exasperated by media figures who can't help but go with what they hear prominent individuals in the field say.

If I were a junior now, and less confident, I would be abandoning my career in this climate.

LLMs are not going away. They will get a little better than they are now, and new model paradigms will come around at some point. But this tale of massive redundancy and skyrocketing unemployment is not going to come from LLMs.

This is the only reason why I cannot wait for a pop, and pray to God that it comes sooner than later. I just want to feel good about technology again. I want to tinker, to feel positivity, to know how sustainable the tools I'm using actually are.

I don't want to be reminded daily of the disgusting reality of unbridled capitalism.

Re: This time is different

#140

Post by bogzz »

johnfn wrote: post #124
parliament32 wrote: post #123

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…

I'm curious about the statement that hallucinations are "fundamentally unsolvable". I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code - by which I mean a reference to something which doesn't exist at all - in many months. I have had great luck driving hallucinations to effectively 0% by using a language with static typechecking, telling LLMs to iterate on type errors until there are none left, and of cour…

ChatGPT 5.2 kept gaslighting me yesterday telling me that LLMs were explainable with Shapley values, and it kept referencing papers which talk about LLMs, and about SHAP, but talk about LLMs being used to explain the SHAP values of other ML models.

I encounter stuff like this every week, I don't know how you don't. I suppose a well-structured codebase in a statically typed language might not provide as much of a surface for hallucinations to present themselves? But like you say, logical problems of course still occur.

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